Understanding the disposal habits of people ..

While trying to research into what influences people's behaviour to disposal, I found that understanding the disposal habits of people is important to find what they dispose and what they do not.  

There are three aspects which influence our disposal habits

1. Distortion bias - Through experiments it was found that people tend to less dispose of end products which have been crushed or distorted than end products which have not been distorted. Only good form end products make it to recycling than crushed or distorted end products.

2. Identity bias - end products with either name or photo of the user tends to get recycled more than items which do not have identification details of the user. 

3. Knowledge of recycling -  How much of resources we use and how much we waste depend to a great extent to the knowledge on how the resource can be recycled. If we know that the end product is going to be recycled, it is but human tendency that we use more of the raw material than if we were to know that the end product would not be recycled. We see here that positive emotions associated with recycling can overpower the negative emotions associated with wasting of resources.

What finally is the awareness of this knowledge what influences disposal behaviour ?

Companies can plan to have end products which are difficult to damage so that it will find its way to recycling than to waste heaps.

george..

Ref : Remi Trudel, The behavioural economics of recycling, HBR, October 2016